'Buddy And Jim': Friends In Life And Songwriting

Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale are singer-songwriters who've each written hits for country and rock acts, and have enjoyed extensive solo careers as performers and producers. Buddy and Jim is their first collaboration, a mixture of original songs and covers from earlier decades of country, rock, folk and soul music.

The third song on the album, a Miller-Lauderdale original, is a plaintive weeper called "That's Not Even Why I Love You." Although they've worked with big names as various as Robert Plant and George Strait, Miller and Lauderdale have never become big stars in their own right, and a song like this may suggest why. They enjoy a good pity party, a well-crafted downer that takes its time before it gets to the hook. In this sense, they're throwbacks to an earlier era of country music, when another new song they've written, "Looking for a Heartache Like You," would have been a honky-tonk hit in the '50s and '60s.

Both Lauderdale and Miller have rough, urgent voices; their harmonies are nice and vinegary, not surgingly interconnected the way true old country brother acts such as the Louvin Brothers and the Wilburn Brothers were. If they don't share the genes, though, they connect through shared emotion in a song such as "Lonely One in This Town," which has been recorded by acts ranging from the Mississippi Sheiks to the Lovin' Spoonful's John Sebastian.

Read the full article at NPR.